Multiracial movement

To challenge the conservative tendencies of contemporary multiracialism and confront the recruitment of the multiracial movement by right-wing political forces determined to undo the gains of the civil rights movement. 

Here we must look to the pseudoconcepts of race and racism on which the multiracial movement and the field of multiracial studies have drawn. To illustrate, we can consider two political manifestos published in close succession at the height of the census debates and that effectively express the premises of multiracialism. Our first example is titled Declaration of Racial... 

How are we to understand this critical reversal Is this desire to cleanse the interracial relationship, to mark out a distinction between multiracialism proper and the supposed pollution of a commodified, pornographic pathology not the same chauvinistic reasoning, the same categorical prophylaxis that the multiracial movement and its academic cohort seeks to undermine What are we to make of this effort to throw out the dirty water—the suspect business, the sexuality of the depths— while saving the healthy baby—the valid romantic event, the sexuality of the heights ... 

What disturbs the discourse of multiracialism is its inability to escape the association between its official discourse and political mobilization and the more disreputable articulations of sex across racial boundaries. How is it, for example, that both the mail-order bride industry and the multiracial movement can claim the same subversive, progressive potential in this post-civil rights era " WTiy is multiracialism maddened by the whole panoply of racist sexual stereotypes if they simply do not apply ... 

In this sense, the multiracial movement participates in civil rights discourse as a political domestication of the movement from which it historically departs. On the distinction between civil rights discourse and the civil rights movement, see Crenshaw and others (1995), especially the introduction. 

Williams (2004) observes the discrepancy between the official message of the multiracial movement—that multiracialism can and will bridge the racial divide—and the opinions of leaders and members stated privately in the interview setting. The latter betrays a deep reticence, and for some a sizeable opposition, to the notion of race mixture as conduit of reconciliation. 

Though making a slightly different point, Spencer (1999) notes the reticence or inability of the multiracial movement to apprehend the critical potential of the questions it sets loose or reanimates on the social landscape. 

The multiracial movement is split on the issue whereas hardline conservatives in the movement want to dismantle the basis of black politics, the liberal faction seeks a working relationship with the traditional civil rights establishment, even amid their disagreements. 

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